National
LGBTQ Task Force Executive Director Rea Carey on Monday issued a
lengthy statement in which she “wholeheartedly” condemned anti-Semitism.

“I
want to make this crystal clear: The National LGBTQ Task Force
wholeheartedly condemns anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic statements made
at any Task Force event, including our Creating Change Conference,” she
said. “It is unacceptable.”

Carey issued her statement three days after hundreds of protesters forced the cancellation of a reception at the Creating Change Conference in Chicago that was to have featured two LGBT rights advocates from Israel.

A Wider Bridge, an organization seeking to bolster “LGBTQ connections with Israel,” organized the reception.

Sarah
Kala-Meir and Tom Canning of the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and
Tolerance were scheduled to speak. They left the room in which the
reception was taking place through a back door as protesters began
shouting.

Those who protested the reception held signs with
slogans that expressed their opposition to “pinkwashing,” which they
describe as the promotion of Israel’s LGBT rights record in an attempt
to deflect attention away from its controversial policies towards the
Palestinians. A video that the Windy City Times shot shows some of
protesters chanting “Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea”
as they marched towards the room in which the reception was taking
place.

Those who describe themselves as
pro-Israel note the slogan has been used by those who support the
destruction of the Jewish state. The Guardian reported that Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, a militant group the State Department has designed as a terrorist organization, used a variation of this chant during a 2012 rally that marked his return to the Gaza Strip.

Hamas has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007.

Carey: Police called ‘without consulting us’

A
second video of the Creating Change Conference protest the Windy City
Times captured shows someone placing a Palestinian flag over the head of
a man who was trying to enter the reception. The protesters began
chanting “shame on you!” after he ripped it down and began yelling into
the crowd.

Carey in her statement noted the
National LGBTQ Task Force “acted to defuse the situation to the best of
our ability.” She said security personnel at the Chicago Hilton where
the Creating Change Conference took place called the police “without
consulting us.”

“We are deeply concerned about how the events of the evening unfolded,” said Carey.

Tony
Varona, a professor at American University Washington College of Law in
D.C. who is a former member of the Human Rights Campaign board of
directors, attended the reception.

He told the Blade on Monday
that he heard “verbal attacks” from some of the protesters “about how
the organizers and the attendees had blood on our hands, how we were
celebrating over dead bodies, didn’t care about people of color, etc.,
etc., and that Israel had to be destroyed.” Varona said he did not
personally hear any protesters use anti-Semitic slurs, but “heard that
others did.”

"The first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize for physics, 1965.

When
Bill Nye ("The Science Guy") publicly changed his mind recently about
genetically modified organisms − he now says they "are an important, and
perhaps, essential component of modern farming" − many were quick to
pounce.

Besides attacking his reasoning and his credentials, some
of his critics even alleged - with absolutely no evidence or
justification - that Bill's change of position must have involved a
payoff by my company, Monsanto.

The simple, innocent truth,
however, is laid out plainly in the recently published revised edition
of Bill's book "Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation." In a
new chapter, Bill explains that after publishing the first edition of
the book, in 2014, he "has spent a great deal of additional time
investigating the issues surrounding GMFs (genetically modified foods)."
His investigation, he explains, included a deeper exploration of the
scientific literature, as well as a visit to our company."I was
not there to be charmed," he comments on that visit. "I was there to see
if Monsanto scientists had hard data to address the issues about GMFs
and the ecosystems in which they grow. I now believe they do."

In other words, Bill dug deeper into the issue and then recognized he'd been mistaken. And then he had the courage to admit it.

Who
else has trod this path? Well, lots of people. After all, to err is
human, and scientists and those who, like Bill, study and write about
science, are human. For science to move ahead, therefore, it's critical
that the people who pursue it be willing to recognize and correct their
mistakes. Otherwise science - and humanity - get stuck.

I know
I've made mistakes as a scientist - for example, in being slow to
recognize the seriousness of climate change. When the data documenting
this trend became overwhelming, however, I studied it - and shifted my
position - because I knew that for a scientist, the real sin is not in
making a mistake, but in refusing to acknowledge it. That's all Bill has
done in this case.

"Cultural enrichment" has brought us a new word: Taharrush. Remember it well, because we are going to have to deal with it a lot. Taharrush
is the Arabic word for the phenomenon whereby women are encircled by
groups of men and sexually harassed, assaulted, groped, raped. After the
Cologne taharrush on New Year's Eve, many German women bought pepper spray. Who can blame them?

A
culture that has a specific word for sexual assaults of women by groups
of men is a danger to all women. The existence of the word indicates
that the phenomenon is widespread. Frau Merkel, Prime Minister Rutte and
all the other open-door politicians could and should have known this.

The
Islamic world is steeped in misogyny. The Koran explicitly states that a
woman is worth only half a man (Suras 2: 228, 2: 282, 4:11), that women
are unclean (5:6), and that a man can have sex with his wife whenever
he wants (24:31). The Koran even says that men are allowed to have sex
slaves (4:24), and that they have the right to rape women whom they have
captured (24:31).

The hadiths, the descriptions of the
life of Muhammad, the ideal human being whose example all the Islamic
faithful must follow, confirm that women are sex objects, that they are
inferior beings like dogs and donkeys, and that there is nothing wrong
with sexual slavery and raping female prisoners.Taharrush
is quite common in Islamic countries. Women are frequently surrounded by
men and subsequently abused. The Egyptian website Jadaliyya points out
that it also happens to veiled women. Women are victims simply because
they are women and not because they have provoked the men by their
conduct or "provocative" clothing. It can happen in the streets, public
transport, supermarkets, or during protest demonstrations.

In
2011, the American television journalist Lara Logan had her clothes
ripped off and "was raped with the hands" by a group of 200 men on
Tahrir Square in Cairo. Two years later, a young Dutch woman became a taharrush
victim at the same square. Now, along with the flow of migrants from
the Islamic world, the phenomenon also reached Europe. The elite tried
to keep it hidden from the people, but they cannot do so anymore.

Fuck Bloomberg. The Presidency isn't for sale to billionaires. Democracy is too valuable to be owned by the super rich.From The Los Angeles Times:http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-bloomberg-independent-campaign-20160126-story.htmlEditorialJan. 26, 2016Just
when it seemed as if the presidential race couldn't get any stranger,
billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg revealed that he may
run for the White House as an independent if the two major parties
nominate their least mainstream candidates. Having more choices on the
ballot is usually a good thing, and if the Republicans nominate Donald Trump,
a Bloomberg candidacy would at least give voters a wider selection of
billionaires from whom to choose. Yet at the same time, it's unnerving
to think that the major parties could conceivably choose nominees so far
outside the mainstream that the public might actually welcome the idea
of an extraordinarily wealthy man trying to buy his way into the White
House, instead of shuddering at it.

At this point in the race,
it's far too late for a new candidate to enter the party primaries — the
filing deadlines for nominating petitions have already passed in about
half the states. The deadlines for an independent candidate are still
months away, but the obstacles facing a third-party candidate are
enormous. It would take a nearly bottomless bank account — like
Bloomberg's — to pay for the requisite army of signature gatherers in
all 50 states, as well as the army of lawyers to fend off the inevitable
legal challenges.

Another issue is the potential for the major
parties to obstruct a third-party bid. For example, the person
interpreting and applying ballot-access rules in most states is an
elected official, typically a Republican or a Democrat. And the process
of judging signatures is subjective to a degree; that's why there are so
many lawsuits over the issue.

The difficulties in mounting a run
for the White House may help weed out candidates who are well-known but
not serious. But the process should be fair and insulated from the major
parties, which have a parochial interest in limiting third-party
challengers. Although Bloomberg has the resources to fight such
obstructions in court, candidates shouldn't have to face such obstacles
in the first place.

The
irony here is that third-party candidates used to be the ones railing
against corruption and incompetence in the political establishment. Now
that message is being delivered by some of the leaders in the Republican
and Democratic races, including Trump, cage-rattling Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-Texas) and self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). If
Sanders and Trump or Cruz are the nominees, it will leave a huge gap in
the political center for someone to fill — a role that Bloomberg, who's
conservative on fiscal issues but liberal on social ones — thinks he can
swoop in and play. After all, that's how he entered politics in the
first place, using his well-endowed checkbook to take over New York's
City Hall. By moving further away from the center, the major parties are
inviting the billionaire to do it again.

For
a long time, as he campaigned for president, a wide spectrum of
establishment media insisted that Bernie Sanders couldn’t win. Now
they’re sounding the alarm that he might.

And, just in case you haven’t gotten the media message yet -- Sanders is “angry,” kind of like Donald Trump.

Elite
media often blur distinctions between right-wing populism and
progressive populism—as though there’s not all that much difference
between appealing to xenophobia and racism on the one hand and appealing
for social justice and humanistic solidarity on the other.

Many
journalists can’t resist lumping Trump and Sanders together as
rabble-rousing outliers. But in the real world, the differences are
vast.

Donald Trump is to Bernie Sanders as Archie Bunker is to Jon Stewart.

Among regular New York Times columnists,
aversion to Bernie Sanders has become more pronounced in recent days at
both ends of the newspaper’s ideological spectrum, such as it is.
Republican Party aficionado David Brooks (whose idea of a good political
time is Marco Rubio) has been freaking out in print, most recently with
a Tuesday column headlined “Stay Sane America, Please!” Brooks
warned that his current nightmare for the nation is in
triplicate—President Trump, President Cruz or President Sanders. For
Brooks, all three contenders appear to be about equally awful; Trump is
“one of the most loathed men in American public life,” while “America
has never elected a candidate maximally extreme from the political
center, the way Sanders and Cruz are.”

That “political center” of
power sustains huge income inequality, perpetual war, scant action on
climate change and reflexive support for the latest unhinged escalation
of the nuclear arms race. In other words, what C. Wright Mills called
“crackpot realism.”

Meanwhile, liberal Times columnist Paul Krugman (whose idea of a good political time is Hillary Clinton) keeps propounding a
stand-on-head formula for social change—a kind of trickle-down theory
of political power, in which “happy dreams” must yield to “hard
thinking,” a euphemism for crackpot realism.

An excellent rejoinder has come from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “Krugman doesn’t get it,” Reich wrote.
“I’ve been in and around Washington for almost fifty years, including a
stint in the cabinet, and I’ve learned that real change happens only
when a substantial share of the American public is mobilized, organized,
energized, and determined to make it happen.

"When a true genius appears in your world, you may know him by this sign; that all the dunces are against him in a confederacy."—Jonathon Swift

Well,
it’s started. You knew it would. The Democratic establishment is
going into attack mode as their anointed one – Hillary Clinton – is in
danger of losing.

Take a look at some of the assaults that have been launched within the last five days:

Sandy
Goodman, a former producer at NBC Nightly News published a piece on the
Huffington Post, entitled, Voting for Sanders is Voting Republican. The
fact that Bernie does better than Hillary against Republicans is an
inconvenient fact Goodman ignores in this ludicrous hit piece;

Paul
Krugman’s column last Friday suggested that progressives voting for
Sanders weren’t being “adults,” and had no idea how change occurred – in
Krugman’s world, change doesn’t come from the people, apparently. It
comes from party apparatchiks working with the plutocracy;

Thomas
Friedman, another New York Times columnist, essentially called Sanders a
communist – something he knows isn’t true, but it’s a great scare
tactic;

President Obama said Bernie Sanders' ideas haven’t been
tested yet and went on to heap praise on Hillary. It wasn’t an
endorsement, but it came mighty close.

All of these are
coming from credentialed liberals who have been staunch supporters of
the Democratic Party. And therein lies the problem. The Democratic
Party’s interests are no longer aligned with the people’s interests and
they haven’t been for a long time.

And this comes after Debbie
Wassermann Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, set
up the modern era’s first stealth debate program, designed to guarantee
a coronation for Ms. Clinton and keep real progressives like Sanders
and O’Malley under wraps.

The bottom line is, the institutions that used to
represent the people no longer derive their power from the people, so
they are threatened by Sanders, because he does.

Make no mistake, this is about power.

After decades, a right wing cabal of the uber-wealthy, in conjunction with corporations, has literally seized control of government.

Not
only have they rolled back controls on Wall Street, turned elections
into a bidding war in which politicians are purchased like livestock,
and pared government funds down to the point where it can no longer
function; they’ve also set up the rules so that corporations are our
largest recipients of welfare and the 1% walks away with all the spoils. Incredibly, they’ve convinced people it’s good for them.

And Democrats have been co-authors of the problem. Even when poll after poll showed that the majority of American people are left of center
on an issue-by-issue basis, Democrats inched to the center and then to
the right of center … where, until a few months ago, is where you’d find
Hillary, by the way.

Bottom line, until Sanders, the terms of
the national debate were dictated by the Plutocracy, and there was no
way to pierce the carefully constructed interlocking web of money,
media, and myth the Oligarchs constructed. Oh, there were voices – but
they were largely consigned to the fringes of society, with little or no
chance of breaking through to reach the masses of people who’ve been
duped, fleeced and fooled into believing that government is inevitably
inept, taxes are a curse, and an uber-free market our salvation.

Some
of the players in media are a part of this process; some are merely so
immersed in the system they’ve forgotten that it wasn’t always this
way. But either way …

Violent
protests at a Jewish LGBTQ event in Chicago spotlight how growing
emphasis on intersectionality is drowning out the nuances of debate in
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Debra Nussbaum CohenJan 25, 2016

NEW
YORK – The violent shut down of a Jerusalem-based LGBTQ forum by
pro-Palestinian protesters in Chicago on Friday highlighted the growing
influence of intersectionality in movements representing minorities and
the increasing militancy of their anti-Israel views.

Gay Jews
wanting to hear about the work of Jerusalem Open House were unwittingly
caught in the middle of the protest at the Creating Change conference
Friday night, which is the country’s largest LGBTQ gathering. They were
sandwiched between anti-Israel activists and a reception intended to
highlight the Israeli organization’s efforts. The protest at moments
turned violent and threatened to become more so before being dispersed
by police and staff at the Chicago Hilton, where the conference took
place last week.

About 200 protesters crammed into a hotel hallway chanting, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

The
conference is organized by the National LGBTQ Task Force. The
reception, designed to introduce JOH’s work in one of the most fraught
cities anywhere for queer people, was hosted by A Wider Bridge, an
American group that works to create relationships between LGBTQ people
in America and Israel.

Steven Rosenberg, a psychiatric social
worker in Chicago, went to Shabbat services at the conference and tried
to go to the reception. He and a friend got caught in the crowd.

“It
was a mob scene,” he said Sunday, still very shaken up. “I have no
problem with there being a protest. I have a problem with people calling
us murderers and racists. It was loud and they were chanting and
hostile, and it felt like a very unsafe situation.”

“It was a mob
scene,” he said Sunday, still very shaken up. “I have no problem with
there being a protest. I have a problem with people calling us murderers
and racists. It was loud and they were chanting and hostile, and it
felt like a very unsafe situation.”

‘I
knew about BDS, but I didn’t know how common or popular it was
becoming,’ LGBTQ activist says as Jewish groups condemn protesters

WASHINGTON
— After Jewish groups widely praised the National LGBTQ Task Force’s
decision to reverse its cancellation of a Jewish reception featuring
Israeli speakers at the 28th annual Creating Change Conference in
Chicago, Illinois, they are now condemning what unfolded at that
eventual reception on Friday, where roughly 200 protesters prevented the
event from taking place.

After igniting fierce controversy last
week for the initial cancellation, the nation’s oldest gay rights
advocacy group called it “a mistake.” And while its executive director
expressed concern over plans that had been circulating for a protest,
she urged all involved to remain “peaceful” — counsel that, according to
American Jewish organizations and one of the Israelis who was targeted,
was not embraced.

But while American Jewish organizations have
been monitoring for years the nature of anti-Israel efforts in the
United States, the incident was illuminating for an Israeli who traveled
to the Windy City not to discuss the political situation between
Israelis and Palestinians, but to highlight the struggle for acceptance
and equality for gay, lesbian and transgender persons in Israel.

The
anti-Israel demonstrators who turned up Friday evening prevented Tom
Canning and Sarah Kala-Meir of the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and
Tolerance, an Israeli LGBTQ advocacy group, from sharing with a crowd
their experiences dealing with the aftermath a fatal stabbing at last
summer’s Jerusalem pride parade, which they themselves organized.

“The
reception after the Kabbalat Shabbat service was supposed to be very
lighthearted. We were going to talk about our work, how we dealt with
what happened at the pride parade, how it impacted our community and
what are our hopes and dreams for the future of Jerusalem,” Canning told
The Times of Israel. “That was our plan. But we didn’t get to say a
word of what we were planning on saying.”

After Arthur Slepian,
executive director of A Wider Bridge — an organization that builds ties
between LGBTQ communities in North America and Israel, which hosted the
event — showed a video to the attendees and introduced Canning and
Kala-Meir, the protesters broke through security and entered the room,
eventually commandeering the stage.

But while American Jewish
organizations have been monitoring for years the nature of anti-Israel
efforts in the United States, the incident was illuminating for an
Israeli who traveled to the Windy City not to discuss the political
situation between Israelis and Palestinians, but to highlight the
struggle for acceptance and equality for gay, lesbian and transgender
persons in Israel.The anti-Israel demonstrators who turned up
Friday evening prevented Tom Canning and Sarah Kala-Meir of the
Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance, an Israeli LGBTQ advocacy
group, from sharing with a crowd their experiences dealing with the
aftermath a fatal stabbing at last summer’s Jerusalem pride parade,
which they themselves organized.

“The reception after the Kabbalat
Shabbat service was supposed to be very lighthearted. We were going to
talk about our work, how we dealt with what happened at the pride
parade, how it impacted our community and what are our hopes and dreams
for the future of Jerusalem,” Canning told The Times of Israel. “That
was our plan. But we didn’t get to say a word of what we were planning
on saying.”

After Arthur Slepian, executive director of A Wider
Bridge — an organization that builds ties between LGBTQ communities in
North America and Israel, which hosted the event — showed a video to the
attendees and introduced Canning and Kala-Meir, the protesters broke
through security and entered the room, eventually commandeering the
stage.

The bigotry now spewing forth from Donald
Trump and several of his Republican rivals is an extension of this old
race card, now applied to Mexicans and Muslims – with much the same
effect on the white working class voters, who don’t trust Democrats to
be as “tough.”

All true, but this isn't the whole story. Democrats also abandoned the white working class.Democrats
have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four
years, and in that time scored some important victories for working
families – the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax
Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example.

But
they’ve done nothing to change the vicious cycle of wealth and power
that has rigged the economy for the benefit of those at the top, and
undermined the working class. In some respects, Democrats have been
complicit in it. Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently
pushed for free trade agreements, for example, without providing the
millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of
getting new ones that paid at least as well.

They also stood by
as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working
class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose
meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers
to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes.I was there. In
1992, Bill Clinton promised such reform but once elected didn’t want to
spend political capital on it. In 2008, Barack Obama made the same
promise (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?) but never acted on it.

Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

(JTA)
— If you want to understand why the boycott, divestment and sanctions
movement, or BDS, has gained so much ground in the past two years, look
no further than intersectionality, the study of related systems of
oppression.

Intersectionality holds that various forms of
oppression — racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and homophobia —
constitute an intersecting system of oppression. In this worldview, a
transcendent white, male, heterosexual power structure keeps down
marginalized groups. Uniting oppressed groups, the theory goes,
strengthens them against the dominant power structure.

As you
might have guessed, the BDS movement has successfully injected the
anti-Israel cause into these intersecting forms of oppression and itself
into the interlocking communities of people who hold by them. So it’s
increasingly likely that if a group sees itself as oppressed, it will
see Israel as part of the dominant power structure doing the oppressing
and Palestinians as fellow victims. That oppressed group will be
susceptible to joining forces with the BDS movement.

At Columbia
University, Students for Justice in Palestine managed to form an
alliance with No Red Tape, a student group fighting sexual violence.
What does opposing sexual violence have to do with Israel and the
Palestinians?

“The way that No Red Tape conceives of sexual
violence is a form of oppression that is related…to other forms of
oppression,” said one group member.

“Sexual violence is a deeper
political issue, and it cannot be divorced or separated from other
oppressed identities,” said another No Red Tape member.

Intersectionality
with the anti-Israel cause, unfortunately, has not been limited to
groups working against sexual violence at Columbia. The anti-Israel
website Mondoweiss recently declared that “since Mike Brown was shot by
police in Ferguson … solidarity between the Black Lives Matter and
Palestine movements has become an increasingly central tenet of both
struggles.”

Other examples of groups and causes intersecting with BDS supporters abound, both on and off campus.

While
anti-Israelism has long found a sympathetic ear among segments of the
far left, it has not, until recently, enjoyed much popularity among
ethnic minorities. Moreover, until recently, BDS supporters probably
weren’t organized enough to do the necessary outreach to and stewardship
of fellow marginalized groups. Now, evidently, they are.

If you’re a woman over the age of 50, finding work has statistically gotten harder since 2008.The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis recently published a study that showed that half of the long-term unemployed are now women over 50. So what’s going on?

Economics correspondent Paul Solman sat down with Teresa Ghilarducci, a labor economist and the author of the new book, “How to Retire with Enough Money,”
to talk about how age discrimination and assumptions about the worth of
women’s labor affect the job and retirement prospects of “older” women
workers.

For more on the topic, tune in to tonight’s Making Sen$e segment, which airs every Thursday on the PBS NewsHour. The following text has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.— Kristen Doerer, Making Sen$e EditorPaul Solman: What explains discrimination against older women in the workplace?

Teresa Ghilarducci:
So this is a really interesting finding, because we’ve all known about
age discrimination, but I don’t think any of us thought that men were
exempt. The fact that women are the ones that don’t get the jobs when
they’re over 50 and looking for work does though, on second thought,
make sense.

Paul Solman: Why does it make sense?

Teresa Ghilarducci:
Well, a lot of what women do in their lives is punctuated by time
outside of the labor market — taking care of family, taking care of
children — and women’s labor has always been devalued. So if you have an
older woman coming to you and applying for a job, you’re going to think
about what kind of experiences she had, what kind of skills she might
have. And rightly or wrongly, but probably unfairly, you’re going to
assume that she had some time out of the labor market and that she was
doing something that was basically worthless, because she wasn’t being
paid for it.The fact that caring labor is devalued in our society
is something we’re going to have to confront when more and more people
have to be cared for as they get older. But what it does right now is
that it hits a woman really, really hard when she’s trying to get hired.

Chicago, IL, January 25, 2016 — The following
statement is being released by Rea Carey, National LGBTQ Task Force
Executive Director, at the close of this year’s Creating Change
Conference in Chicago, Illinois.

“I want to make this crystal clear: the National LGBTQ Task Force
wholeheartedly condemns anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic statements made
at any Task Force event including our Creating Change Conference. It is
unacceptable. Hate speech of any kind is unacceptable whether it’s
directed at Jewish or Muslim people. Let me also be clear regarding a
reception planned and hosted by the group A Wider Bridge with guests
from Jerusalem Open House that happened after the annual Shabbat service
and a protest of that reception. We are deeply concerned about how the
events of the evening unfolded — and have already initiated a review of
our conference practices.

“The last couple of weeks leading-up to Creating Change have been
rough. The events leading up to and during it have been extremely
hurtful to many — and for really different reasons. What we all are
experiencing is complicated and messy. We know that many people at
Creating Change share our belief in the self-determination of all
people. And for many we have failed to live up to the ideals of our
mission or values. We are leaning into the struggle. As Creating Change
has grown to over 4,000 people, we are experiencing some of what happens
when we ask people to be their full selves, to bring their whole selves
to Creating Change… and those whole selves come into conflict.

“There have been many protests over the 28 years of the conference —
and peaceful protest has been a hallmark of the pursuit of civil rights
in our country. Receptions have never been protested at Creating Change
in all its history. We acted to defuse the situation to the best of our
ability. Without consulting us, hotel security called the police.

“This year’s conference revealed a variety of needed improvements to
the systems and infrastructure we have built over the years for a
smaller conference — that now need to be evolved to meet the challenges
of a growing attendance. In light of all that has happened, I have
already started a review of the Conference so we can make needed changes
in the future. Among them are: inclusiveness and program content
review; safety and security; and promoting conversation and peaceful
protest.

“We know we have much to learn and many to learn from. As we work
hard to improve the Creating Change Conference experience over the next
year, we will include in that review process consulting widely with
leaders in different communities, supporters and stakeholders.

“The Creating Change Conference, for the past 28 years, has been both
a family reunion, a home for activists, a movement town hall and a
place for movement building, for wrestling with the hard issues, and to
energize activists to press on. It has always been a special place and
will continue to be as it evolves and grows. If not the Task Force, who?
If not Creating Change, where?”

A
gay-rights group, caving to anti-Israel extremists, decides to
cancel an ‘intensely divisive’ Jewish event—and then, under opposite
pressure, decides to include it. The flawed lesson? The victim
who shouts the loudest gets what they want in today’s hyper-politicized
cultural climate.

As
I write this, ISIS is hunting gay men to toss from the rooftops of
Raqaa, and nearly 80 countries proscribe homosexuality. Yet for a
36-hour period earlier this week, the National LGBTQ Task Force chose to
ally itself not with the one country in the Middle East that guarantees
and protects the human rights of LGBTQ people, but with those who hang
them from construction cranes.

On Sunday, the Task Force announced
that it had canceled a post-Shabbat service reception at its annual
Creating Change conference organized by the San Francisco-based
nonprofit A Wider Bridge, which builds connections between LGBT
communities in North America and Israel. Headlining the evening were
representatives from Jerusalem Open House, an LGBT community center that
serves a diverse array of constituencies, Palestinians and Israeli
Arabs among them. Caving to pressure from a handful of anti-Israel
extremists, the Task Force withdrew its sponsorship and kicked A Wider
Bridge off its program.

“We canceled the reception when it became
clear to us it would be intensely divisive rather than the
community-building, social atmosphere which is the norm for Friday night
at the conference,” Task Force Executive Director Rea Carey said in an
emailed statement. Tyler Gregory, Deputy Director of A Wider Bridge, told the Washington Blade
that the Task Force “recommended we either cancel [the] event, or
ensure that our event speakers condemn the Israeli government in their
remarks,” though which aspects of Israel’s government the Task Force
expected A Wider Bridge—which receives no Israeli government funding—to
“condemn” were left vague. Refusing to comply with either demand, A
Wider Bridge was forced to move its event to a different hotel.

Carey’s
contention that the happening—announced months ago—would be “intensely
divisive” appears to rest on complaints registered by just three people:
Dean Spade, a transgender professor at the Seattle University School of
Law and a self-described “trans south Asian performance art duo” named
Dark Matter. These, at least, were the only individuals named in the Blade
story as having made public statements egging on the Task Force to
engage in what is effectively an act of anti-Semitic prejudice and
segregation.

And let there be no confusion: A non-compulsory
Shabbat dinner and discussion of the Israeli LGBT experience is
“divisive” in the way that the presence of a gay man in a locker room is
“divisive.” It only “offends” the sensibilities of bigots. When a white
person refuses to sit at a lunch counter next to a black person, or a
straight football player refuses to play alongside a gay one, we have a
word for that: discrimination. Nonetheless, a group ostensibly committed
to fighting discrimination and that holds a conference so inclusive of
the world’s many diversities that it provides “scent-free” areas for individuals highly sensitive to smell, bowed to those wanting to make it Jew-free as well.

Fortunately,
after complaints by grassroots activists and high-profile gay Jews like
Congressman Jared Polis and Robbie Kaplan, the lawyer who successfully
argued the landmark marriage equality case United States vs. Windsor, the Task Force came to its senses, and announced Tuesday
morning that it had reversed its decision to cancel the Israel-themed
evening. What she had just hours earlier described as an “intensely
divisive” program, Carey now says is integral to “our core value of
inclusion.”

This is an edifying moment for gays, Jews, and the
broader left. Were they to let this act of blatant discrimination stand,
the leaders of the Task Force would have betrayed all these communities
by succumbing to the heckler’s veto. In the loftier precincts of
progressive journalism, higher education, and the non-profit world,
those hecklers tend to be proponents of “intersectionality,” a voguish theory purporting
that power is inextricably linked to aspects of identity like race,
gender, religion, and sexual orientation, and that an individual’s
“marginalization” is thus determined by their accumulation of various
traits. Across the country, pseudo-intellectual totalitarians posing as
outcasts regularly intimidate earnest but spineless liberals into
capitulation. From the Oscar red carpet to Yale University quads,
whoever shouts the loudest and claims victimization on account of more
facets of their identity can expect to get what they demand, regardless
of the quality or even logic of what they have to say.

Sunday, January 24, 2016

As a life long skeptic I have always found the number of otherwise
intelligent people who fall for New Age mumbo jumbo to be mind blowing.

After
having my mind truly expanded by people like Buckminster "Bucky"
Fuller, Carl Sagan and other scientists, futurists and artists I watched
people fall for bullshit like Scientology and est.

As an atheist I
was appalled at the number of feminist women who fell for crap like
homeopathy, crystals, feng shui, wicca and the whole panoply of
questionable practices.

Granted all of the above are just as valid
as any religion but that is the point. Why go to all the effort to
reject a traditional religion with great holidays only to embrace one
with crappy at best holidays?

I am further appalled by health
plans that pay for all this "alternative medicine." As Tim Minchin
pointed out, "There is a name for alternative medicine that works, it is
called medicine.

It’s
the relaxation technique of choice, popular with employers and even the
NHS. But some have found it can have unexpected effects

Dawn FosterSaturday 23 January 2016I
am sitting in a circle in a grey, corporate room with 10 housing
association employees – administrators, security guards, cleaners – eyes
darting about nervously. We are asked to eat a sandwich in silence. To
think about every taste and texture, every chewing motion and bite. Far
from being relaxed, I feel excruciatingly uncomfortable and begin to
wonder if my jaw is malfunctioning. I’m here to write about a new
mindfulness initiative, and since I’ve never to my knowledge had any
mental health issues and usually thrive under stress, I anticipate a
straightforward, if awkward, experience.

Then comes the
meditation. We’re told to close our eyes and think about our bodies in
relation to the chair, the floor, the room: how each limb touches the
arms, the back, the legs of the seat, while breathing slowly. But
there’s one small catch: I can’t breathe. No matter how fast, slow, deep
or shallow my breaths are, it feels as though my lungs are sealed. My
instincts tell me to run, but I can’t move my arms or legs. I feel a
rising panic and worry that I might pass out, my mind racing. Then we’re
told to open our eyes and the feeling dissipates. I look around. No one
else appears to have felt they were facing imminent death. What just
happened?

For days afterwards, I feel on edge. I have a permanent
tension headache and I jump at the slightest unexpected noise. The fact
that something seemingly benign, positive and hugely popular had such a
profound effect has taken me by surprise.

Mindfulness, the
practice of sitting still and focusing on your breath and thoughts, has
surged in popularity over the last few years, with a boom in apps,
online courses, books and articles extolling its virtues. It can be done
alone or with a guide (digital or human), and with so much
hand-wringing about our frenetic, time-poor lifestyles and information
overload, it seems to offer a wholesome solution: a quiet port in the
storm and an opportunity for self-examination. The Headspace app,
which offers 10-minute guided meditations on your smartphone, has more
than three million users worldwide and is worth over £25m. Meanwhile,
publishers have rushed to put out workbooks and guides to line the
wellness shelves in bookshops.

When
the rights of women and a warm reception for migrants come into
conflict, it’s understandable if the left panics – but we have to
salvage nuance

Deborah OrrSaturday 9 January 2016Oh
dear. It’s leftageddon. Two matters close to the progressive heart have
been pitted against each other. In one corner, the right of women to
stroll down the street, wearing what we like to wear without being
mistaken for a walking, gilt-edged invitation to cop a free feel. In the
other, the right of men, women and children to flee war, oppression and
privation to seek refuge in other countries, without being seen as a
swarm of subhuman parasites who will destroy any naive host who welcomes
them. Tricky.

News of events in Cologne on New Year’s Eve
filtered out slowly, but it has become glaringly obvious that during
celebrations in that city – and, to a lesser extent, other German cities
– many women were targeted by gangs of men who surrounded them and
subjected them to sexual assaults. The women, and witnesses, say that
their attackers seemed to be from the Middle East or north Africa.
Critics of Germany’s open-door refugee policy say they warned us.
Nightmare.

Short of going full conspiracy-theory, and suggesting
a) that rightwing German men have slapped on the fake tan in a fiendish
effort to engineer a revolt against German immigration policy; or b)
that rightwing German men have slapped on the fake tan and dresses, then made it all up, to the same end, there appear to be few uncomplicated ways to blame the right for all this.

I’m
not counting the argument that says there is no hard evidence that
these were refugees, because – let’s face it – it’s silly to pretend
that the word “refugee” is synonymous with the word “saint” anyway.

Only
a simpleton – or, more commonly, person driven by instinct and emotion –
thinks you can counter the uncompromising prejudice of “all immigrants
are bad” with the uncompromising prejudice of “all immigrants are good”.
The debate is worth having because the story has presented itself to
us, whether the story is true or not. It will keep on presenting itself,
in some form or another, until we can achieve some measure of agreement
over what the story means.

The stereotypical right tends to blame
the stereotypical left for all its woes in an uncomplicated way. The
stereotypical left tends to respond with similar clod-hopping
generalisation. But the hopeful columnist can still believe it possible
to salvage some nuance; perhaps even, heaven forfend, some useful and
solid points on which both left and right can agree.

First, these
were opportunistic, organised crimes. The fact that they were carried
out in the open, in front of many witnesses, suggests that the
perpetrators were pretty sure they would get away with it. Sexual
criminals who get away with things tend to become more ambitious.
There’s no denying that this is a serious problem.

Robert ReichSaturday, January 16, 20161. “He’d never beat Trump or Cruz in a general election.”

Wrong.
According to the latest polls, Bernie is the strongest Democratic
candidate in the general election, defeating both Donald Trump and Ted
Cruz in hypothetical matchups. (The latest Real Clear Politics averages
of all polls shows Bernie beating Trump by a larger margin than Hillary
beats Trump, and Bernie beating Cruz while Hillary loses to Cruz.)

2. “He couldn’t get any of his ideas implemented because Congress would reject them.”

If
both house of Congress remain in Republican hands, no Democrat will be
able to get much legislation through Congress, and will have to rely
instead on executive orders and regulations. But there’s a higher
likelihood of kicking Republicans out if Bernie’s “political revolution”
continues to surge around America, bringing with it millions of young
people and other voters, and keeping them politically engaged.

3. “America would never elect a socialist.”

P-l-e-a-s-e.
America’s most successful and beloved government programs are social
insurance – Social Security and Medicare. A highway is a shared social
expenditure, as is the military and public parks and schools. The
problem is we now have excessive socialism for the rich (bailouts of
Wall Street, subsidies for Big Ag and Big Pharma, monopolization by
cable companies and giant health insurers, giant tax-deductible CEO pay
packages) – all of which Bernie wants to end or prevent.Continue reading at: http://robertreich.org/post/137454417985

Mark
Goldring, the Oxfam GB chief executive, said: “It is simply
unacceptable that the poorest half of the world population owns no more
than a small group of the global super-rich – so few, you could fit them
all on a single coach.

In
May of 2014, Ronnie and Lisa Hankins were driving back from his
grandfather’s funeral in Virginia when they were targeted by a gang of
police officers in search of cash.

As Lisa drove the couple
westbound down I-40, they saw an officer, who happened to be with the
23rd Judicial District Drug Task Force, and Hankins correctly predicted
that they were about to be pulled over.

“I told her we are going to get pulled over,” Ronnie said to NewsChannel 5.“What made you think he was going to stop you?” NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked.

“Because we had out-of-state license plates and my wife is Hispanic,” he explained.

The
couple was then pulled over, and the officer quickly separated them
before beginning his harassment of Lisa. In the video, the officer is
heard badgering Lisa in an attempt to get her to consent to a search.

“You say there’s not anything illegal in it. Do you mind if I search it today to make sure?” the officer asked.

Lisa responded, “I’d have to talk to my husband.”

The
cop continued to intimidate and harass her, “I am asking you for
permission to search your vehicle today — and you are well within your
rights to say ‘no,’ and you can say ‘yes.’ It’s totally up to you as to
whether you want to show cooperation or not.”

Knowing that they
had done nothing wrong and the officer had no reason to search them,
Lisa continued to assert her rights and refused the search.

“You
have to either give me a yes or no,” the cop continued. “I do need an
answer so I can figure out whether I need a dog to go around it or not.”

“We’ve
ran a dog, and the dog’s alerted on the vehicle. So we are going to be
searching it, OK? And whatever is in there we are going to find in just a
second,” said the officer to the couple.

“There’s never been any drugs in the vehicle and never will be,” Ronnie declared.

Ronnie
became furious as he knew that the dog did not alert on his vehicle; he
knows this because he is also a cop. He’s a federal police officer at
the Marine Corps Air Station-Miramar in San Diego.

“You are lying
about the dog hitting on the car. The dog didn’t hit on the car either.
You guys are drug task force. You are out here harassing me and my wife
when I am just coming back from a funeral,” he said.

The agent,
knowing full well that Ronnie was a cop, responded sarcastically, “That
is exactly how I would expect most police officers to act.”

“Just
like a child, you can make a child say anything you want. You can make a
dog do whatever you want to if you train them the right way,” Ronnie
explained to NewsChannel 5 Investigates.

For nearly an
hour, cops held the innocent couple on the side of the interstate while
they tore Lisa’s new car apart. They even went so far as to rip the
dashboard out. They found no drugs.

But after finding no drugs, the truth came out — these cops weren’t looking for drugs at all — they wanted cash.

Tom Boggioni09 Jan 2016Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stirred up a hornet’s nest of anti-science sentiment on Friday when he posted a photo on Facebook of himself with his daughter Max at the doctor’s office.Zuckerberg’s offense? Writing “Doctor’s visit — time for vaccines!”

The
Facebook posting immediately drew both praise and condemnation for the
tech billionaire, as supporters of childhood vaccinations battled with
anti-vaxxers in the comments on a post that was “liked” over 2.5 million
times.

Among the over 56,000 comments were many who praised
Zuckerberg for caring about his daughter’s health, including Stuart
Duncan who wrote: “As
someone with autism, with a son with autism, as someone who is
constantly watching good people put their own children at serious risk
because of old, fraudulent fears of vaccines and autism… thank you for
being sensible. Thank you for doing what’s right and also for showing
everyone else that it’s the right thing to do as well.”

The
anti-vaxx movement has fought against child hood immunizations based
upon a since discredited study linking childhood vaccines to autism. The
anti-vaxx movement recently funded a new study looking for a link,
only to have it blow up in their faces when researchers returned empty-handed.Whether
Zuckerberg’s post was meant as a taunt or a simple reminder to get
children vaccinated, the negative response was to be expected — or as
Laura-Kathleen Redman commented, ” *patiently waits for anti-vaxxers to show up*”

And show up, they did.

“We
all care about our kids. Growing up, my mom’s best friend had a
perfectly healthy daughter. She received MMR and had a grand mal seizure
and suffered brain damage. Her dr diagnosed her with vaccine injury.
She was left unable to talk or walk for the rest of her life. So that
was MY first personal experience with vaccines,” Amy Smith wrote.
“Bottom line…A pharmaceutical that carries at least a risk of harm to
some, should never be mandated. Because, in the end, no one seems to
care about the ‘sacrifices’ made for the ‘common good.'”

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson